Officers in Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport recently discovered 11 live otters in a piece of unclaimed luggage left at the oversized baggage area.

The six smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata)—Southeast Asia's largest otter—and five oriental small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinerea), the world's smallest otters at less than 11 pounds (five kilograms), are under threat in Southeast Asia.

But otters aren't the only victims of the illicit wildlife trade. Stuffed into carry-ons, packed into suitcases, and bundled into crates, traffickers have tried to smuggle all kinds of wild animals through airports.

"The U.S. seizes over $10 million worth of illegal wildlife each year, but this only scratches the surface," said Edward Grace, deputy chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement. "[On] any given day, someone, somewhere in the world, is poaching or smuggling wildlife."

Here are six other kinds of wild animals that people have tried to sneak past customs.

anyone caught smuggling wild animals or buying wild animals should be put in a crate and made to suffer the same fate as the animals. Don't those who would buy these animals see the error of their ways?

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the slow loris (genus Nycticebus which means "night monkey") is a small nocturnal primate separate from the monkey. On the other hand, Merriam Webster defines a monkey as a nonhuman primate mammal with the exception usually of lemurs and tarsiers. Several other publications also accord with this classification.

The demand for these wild animals is the problem and captive breeding is not a very sound solution to reduce poaching. Poaching is far cheaper than breeding, and more advocacy and education needs to be done on the inappropriateness of these wild animals as "pets." Even bred in captivity, these are wild animals and are not suited for domestic life in someone's home (domestication takes tens of thousands of years). The welfare of these animals would be severely compromised in a captive setting, as the large majority of people are just not equipped to meet the physical, social, dietary, and mental demands of wild animals. Parrots face this same problem. Though the ban of wild-caught birds in the US and EU has diminished the number of birds taken from the wild, poaching still persists and every single species of parrot on the planet, with the exception of the budgerigar and the cockatiel, appears in one of the appendices of CITES. Parrots bred in captivity are still wild animals, and many people struggle to provide for them appropriately. The better approach to combat smuggling would be to work with local communities that make money from poaching and develop more sustainable livelihoods (and tackle the drug cartels as well, which tend to run the illicit animal trade as well as human trafficking - but that's another issue). I think humanitarian and conservation non-profits and NGOs need to work more closely together in this regard - the health of the environment in these poorer countries is often tied to issues of poverty.